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The Pursuance Project – Impactful, agile, secure civic collaboration

The pursuance system is the world’s first comprehensive framework for process democracy. That is, it allows individuals with no prior relationship to self-organize into robust, agile entities governed via a “proceduralism of agreement.” These entities, called pursuances, in turn engage and collaborate among themselves to whatever extent they choose, leading ultimately to a vast and formidable ecosystem of opposition to institutionalized injustice. (Excerpt from Project description)

This system will be populated on an invitation basis, beginning towards the end of 2017. But Barrett has initiated a collaboration with Pirate Parties International. Raymond Johansen, activist and member of the board of PPI is now in the process of populating several rooms in Mattermost, soon to begin onboarding people into an alpha version of the Pursuance System. PPI’s usage of and feedback on the software will help Pursuance’s software developers optimize it for our use cases. In the coming weeks activists, designers, artists, FOIA experts, investigative journalists, coders and developers will be invited to take part. In fact, at the time of writing projects have already started inside PPI’s Team.

To get an invitation you may contact Ray directly. Twitter or Facebook is fine. If you have his email address feel free to send him a request. Now lets hear from the main people themselves.

The framework described by Brown is quite extraordinary in that the vision is to empower people to create their own ‘pursuance’ and provide a platform to use their abilities in collaboration with others to attain specific outcomes. By doing so, they have the opportunity to scale up and potentially have a greater impact using the collaborative network.

Steve Phillips explains how he got involved with the Pursuance Project

Hi everyone! I’m Steve Phillips, lead developer and project manager of the Pursuance Project, started by Barrett Brown.

In March I learned that Barrett was out of jail and wanted to build an end-to-end encrypted environment to help make activists, journalists, and other groups more impactful by enabling them to coordinate effectively online, which sounded not just awesome but has a ton in common with what I’d been building for the last year and a half, including what I presented at DEF CON 2 years ago.

So I reached out to him, flew to Texas to meet him, and 2 days later he put me in charge of building the Pursuance System (which you can read about here; somewhat more technical intro here)!

As Barrett wrote at PursuanceProject.org, our ultimate goal is to produce “a vast and formidable ecosystem of opposition to institutionalized injustice.”

I’ve been programming for 8 years, have been using Linux for almost 16 years, and I have extensive experience both building user-friendly, high-quality software and managing small teams of developers.

I am VERY excited to be working with Pirate Party folks and would love for you all to be among the first people in the world to use the Pursuance System as we build it. Let me know what tools you need to change the world and I will do whatever I can to provide them.

Right now we’ve launched an early version of the Pursuance chat feature as a standalone app — LeapChat, which anyone can use by visiting LeapChat.org and inviting people to the secure room you get redirected to, resulting in an end-to-end encrypted chat session. Any feedback you have for which features should next be added to LeapChat would be very helpful!

The core of the first version of Pursuance that we’ll be launching is essentially a task management system built for large groups that will do things like allow you to specify which skills are necessary to complete a task, then have the software automatically find people with all the skills necessary to complete that task and ask them if they’d like to do it! This enables Pursuance scale to large groups better than anything else that currently exists.

We believe that the Internet should be amazing at enabling large groups of like-minded people to join forces to combat injustice… but it isn’t. We’re here to change that.

Barrett Brown’s vision for the Pursuance Project

When asked about his future projects, Brown outlines a vision for journalists and bloggers to better share information by creating what he calls a ‘process democracy platform’. This project has been in the works since 2009, before his incarceration, and with the help of trusted collaborators Brown continues to work towards creating a revolutionary crowd sourcing collaboration. Collaborations will occur between institutions, non-profits , academics and even citizen journalists.

“The way [the pursuance] system works, it doesn’t matter if on the margins quality declines, because on the margins, these people are free to bring on people, but they still have to handle them. So if it’s data gathering, for instance, if you’re a journalist or you’re running a crowd-sourced project, and you bring on a few people, each person who’s bringing on people obviously has an impetus to bring on actual quality people to the best of their ability because they have to deal with them, and bad information, useless information, that comes out of these distant [peripheries] on the system are not going to make it up the submission, and there’s a whole mechanism for all of that.” – Barrett Brown

“So that was the original impetus. There are a lot of other features that make this work for different things. There’s a great mass of people out there who are tweeting and commenting, and they’re upset, and there’s some portion who are very honest people who are capable, who are knowledgeable, but who are not being provided with (a) the ability to help and (b) the ability to rise. If you present people the ability to do things correctly, and by doing things correctly, rise to a position where they have the ability to do things on a larger scale, and if you make it apparent that that ability is there, and if we provide examples of it working and provide a degree of leadership, and frankly, propaganda as to why the time has come for this kind of thing, then it will work.” – Barrett Brown

The second anniversary of Jason Westcott’s death is coming up on May 27, 2016 and his family will be hosting an Event in his memory.

—| Jason’s Two Year Memorial May 27th 2016 |—
1) Memorial on Friday at 7:00 pm in Oldsmar, Florida at the Memorial Park on Shore Drive.
2) Memorial on Friday at 4:00 pm in Rome, New York for family and friends at Pinti Field.

Jason Westcott was a young man whose death was a needless tragedy.

Why should this matter to you and me?

Like millions of others living in poverty and struggling to survive, Jason worked hard, smoked weed and occasionally sold small amounts to his friends for their personal use.

This is not the profile of a hardened criminal working within organized crime. It is not the profile of a man so dangerous that the police needed a SWAT team to arrest him and kill him in the process of that arrest.

He was a frightened man who had received death threats and who had been advised by the police to keep his gun available and use it if necessary. He followed their advice.

So, why did this tragedy happen?

It happened because abuse of power and corruption are infesting police forces and our justice system, from the lowest to the highest levels, around the world. This corruption and abuse of power is being treated as though it’s acceptable and a ‘necessary evil’ in the ‘war on drugs’.

It’s okay for confidential informants to lie if it suits the police agenda.

It’s okay for police officers to perjure themselves in court since their target must be guilty, according to them.

It’s okay for judges to toss people in jail at the drop of a hat and over the most minor of offenses, to assume guilt even if the evidence doesn’t warrant such an assumption, or, to violate their civil rights, if they are disenfranchised and can’t afford to fight back.

Tampa Bay is no different. It’s no better or worse.

Unless we fix the problem of abuse of power and corruption no matter where it appears or at what level of society we will continue to have Jason Westcott’s die needlessly and tragically.

“In the minds of the Tampa police, Jason Westcott was expendable. Now that he’s dead, he’s just another piece of drug war collateral damage. Just like Eurie Stamps. Or Kathryn Johnston. Or Jonathan Ayers. Or Gonzalo Guizan. Or Isaac Singletary, Tarika Williams, Alberto Sepulveda, Pedro Navarro, Jose Guerena, Trevon Cole, Humbert Henkel, or Ramarley Graham, among others. There’s no need to reexamine the policies that led to these people dying, because these people simply aren’t that important. There have been dozens of Jason Westcotts before this one. And there will be more.”

What do you get when you combine a hundred hackers with a bunch of business billionaires? Just maybe a solution for global homelessness!

Manchester, UK, April 15, 2016: At 9am on April 21, the Business Rocks conference in Manchester will welcome the 48-hour Hackathon for Homelessness, bringing together hackers from around the globe, billionaire business leaders, and international activists to collaborate on producing a technological solution for the growing problem of global homelessness.

“They say that a nation should be judged by how they treat their most vulnerable and if trends in criminalization of the impoverished and homeless is any indication, the US & UK are absolutely losing this battle,” says US activist and actor Joe Fionda, one of the Hackathon panelists.“The objective to the hackathon is to develop a universal human rights framework. We have government systems that have now devolved to the point in which the homeless and impoverished are criminalized, thus adding an even more crushing burden for those trying to escape this vicious cycle. This behavior is antithetical to the idea of the Social Contract and undermines the legitimacy of these institutions. The framework will also seek to establish an easily locally deployable decentralized model to bring aid to the homeless, wherever it may be, and do it at minimal cost. The amount of capital being used to criminalize the homeless, at the end of the day, is even more than it would cost to effectively deploy sustainable shelter and communities.”

“There is also a medical component to this. Many homeless are often burdened with illness, be it physical or mental. Homelessness also can drive further mental illness. A universal framework will integrate recognition of mental illness not as a stigma to further ones homelessness but just the opposite. Effectively deployable technology to aid medical emergencies will be essential.”

The hackathon is a competitive event in which participants will form into teams and work to create an app or tool that directly impacts the lives of the homeless in a positive way while fitting into the framework of human rights that is also being developed on-site. Judging by the distinguished international panel takes place at 3pm on the 22nd, and the prize will be awareded at 4:30 on the main Business Rocks stage. A panel consisting of the homeless from Gary Neville’s Stock Exchange project, scientists, developers, technologists, social housing workers and experts on the current migrant crisis will set the ‘tech for good’ challenge.

From Manchester’s City Centre to the shores of the Mediterranean, homelessness isn’t just about rough sleepers and migrants fleeing war zones, it’s about the needed change in the hearts and minds of those in a position to use their skills to help solve the growing crisis.
This is a project inspired by the homeless, for the homeless.

Sunday March 13th: Personal statement regarding the recent article in the Saudi state newspaper Okaz on Friday March 11 about four men condemned to death

From Dubai I hear the following: Death sentences against four Saudi men convicted of terrorism have been confirmed by 13 judges, a Saudi newspaper reported, raising the possibility of a new round of executions two months after 47 people including a prominent Shi’ite cleric were put to death.

To me this clearly says that on Thursday or Friday a court upheld and earlier verdict. The three juveniles, including Ali al-Nimr, had their verdict upheld last year by the SCC (Specialized Criminal Court). There is no reason why the 5 judges in the Supreme Court would again hear their cases. (As far as I know.)

Therefore logic dictates that these four executions have absolutely nothing to do with the Quatif juveniles. There is simply no way these things are connected and I suggest we can all breathe a sigh of relief today.

Let me add that the Okaz article clearly states that the four where connected to acts related to Daesh.

The four, including the older Al Nimr, were Shiites who were accused of involvement in shooting policemen. – an act that has never been connected to Daesh or Al-Queda.

Caution please!Lastly I do not ask anyone to stop the pressure upon the Saudi government regarding the three juveniles. Quite the opposite. But I do caution everyone in the future to be more vigilant when spreading rumors when there is little to no fact present. It hurts the families to such an extent that you cannot even fathom it. In this I include all activists and especially Reprieve and Amnesty International.

I have been contacted by hundreds of activists regarding this, as it always happens when rumors become news articles. As a result I contact all of my sources, many of them risking their lives when talking to me.

There is a small chance that I am wrong in this but, as the Okaz article clearly states, we will hear from the Supreme Court in Jeddah early next week. At that point names will be published. In my experience we will read about it in a Dubai newspaper.

UPDATEI was proven right. All three contacted their families and one of the mothers even got to visit her son on Sunday. I have however, received information, that four men was indeed executed on Sunday. The source is highly placed in the US State Department and cannot be named. My theory, repeat theory, is that they are not publishing this yet – simply waiting for a more opportun time to go public. The other theory is that nobody, but the murderer executed Sunday morning, was killed.

UPDATE 2 March 17: Last night Saudi Press Agency confirmed the 73rd execution in 2016 Omar al-Rabie was killed yesterday. My thinking is that we can expect two more executions of “criminals” in the near future.

UPDATE 3 March 19: A week after Amnesty scared three families and thousands of activists implying that Ali al-Nimr would be executed the next day the facts are in. A WEEK later. Go back to the drawing board and change the way you work. Are you trying to get more paying members by publishing articles about cruxifictions that anyone could see would never happen?

Contact

Global Pirate Activist

Ray is a writer, columnist, contributor and subeditor for a large number of groups, pages and blogs - with a wide global network.
He is the International Coordinator at Pursuance Project and The Pirate Party of Norway.
Furthermore he sits on the board of several organisations, including Barrett Brown's Pursuance Project and Pirate Parties International. He is a Human Rights and Privacy Activist, a Hacktivist and is heavily involved in whistleblower support.

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Kitty Hundal

Kitty Hundal, author of From The Shadows: Persecution Games. is currently the Owner and Operator of Kitty Hundal Dot Com Solutions.
She is also a contributing author to Hacktivist Culture, The Cryptosphere, The Fifth Column and several personal, special interest blogs.